Friday, May 10, 2013

Non-Aspirational Naming

Romeo and Juliet by Ford Madox Brown (1870)

Selma is the most non-aspirational name you can give a kid. When you name your daughter Selma, you are giving her the subliminal message that you don’t want her straying far from the family manse. Ceil is also making a similar statement. Naming your sonRutherford, Forbes, Cumberland or the
self same daughter Prudence, Missy or Babs and you convey a different sort of message, particularly if you're not a blue blood. Then there are simply the Inas, Madges and Adeles. If you want your daughter to be one of those wizened
old ladies before she’s out of her swaddling clothes then name her Blanche.
Okay there was Blanche Dubois, but most Blanches make us blanch. And what parent wants their daughter to be regarded as with it, names her Muriel or their
son Howie, Irving, Harvey or the old Harv. Now Earl or Duke pose some real
problems. These are regal names, but you can’t name your kid the Earl of
something or Duke of something if haven’t inherited a title. When you name a kid Duke it sounds like Duke Snyder or Earl, Earl “the
Pearl” Monroe. And then of course you have 'The Duke of Earl." Gaylord is another matter, but the name, like certain jobs, doesn’t come with the usual benefits. Now there's a middle line. You can name your boy Tom, Dick or
Harry. Tom Smith is a veritable tabula rasa, on which he will lay his own
imprint. In Israel there’s Moishe. Italy has lots of Fabrizios, and Germany its Klauses or Clauses and what would Russia be without its Olgas or China without its Chiangs. Jack
is a nice one. If you have a subliminal desire to birth a kid with an edge,
it’s a great moniker if your last name happens to be black. Jack Black took no flack, nice! Fiona and
Spencer both occupy the 38th parallel when it comes to naming since
by naming your child one of those you are coming perilously close to
putting them in enemy territory. “What’s in a name?” Juliet asks in the famed balcony scene. “That which we
call a rose.”

1 comment:

Yes, indeed, what's in a name...When I was sixteen my girlfriends and I all changed the spelling of our names, adding in superfluous Y's and IE's, doubling some letters and dropping others. Years later, some of the changes have remained (though they are not, strictly speaking, legal; I insist on the right to spell my own name however I want). I told my son he could change his name to whatever he wanted if he found one that fit better. For a day we called him 'Mike' before he decided to revert to the unique name we'd saddled him with without his consent. And don't get me started on nicknames: my army-brat cousins nicknamed 'King' and 'Duke', or all the guys I dated through the years nicknamed 'Butch'. I oughtta write a book about the 'Butch's' I've known. All of them tried to live up to it.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.